The secret memo's warning that the Islamist regime "with its
apocalyptic constitution will never give up the atomic bomb" also
contradicts conventional wisdom that the Green movement wants a nuclear
Iran.

With Iran close to a nuclear weapon, military action may be the only
option. But the Green memo is a shameful blemish for a president who
could have prevented a threat to the free world of nuclear terror, but
didn't."

11/20/17, "The Lost Journalistic Standards of Russia-gate," Robert Parry, Consortium News"Exclusive: The Russia-gate hysteria has witnessed a
widespread collapse of journalistic standards as major U.S. news outlets
ignore rules about how to treat evidence in dispute, writes Robert
Parry."

Shane added, “the court documents describe in detailhow Mr.
Papadopoulos continued to report to senior campaign officials on his
efforts to arrange meetings with Russian officials, …the documents do
not say explicitly whether, and to whom, he passed on his most explosive discovery – that the Russians had what they considered compromising
emails on Mr. Trump’s opponent.
.“J.D. Gordon, a former Pentagon official who worked for the Trump
campaign as a national security adviser [and who dealt directly with
Papadopoulos] said he had known nothing about Mr. Papadopoulos’
discovery that Russia had obtained Democratic emailsor of his prolonged
pursuit of meetings with Russians.”

Missing Corroboration

But the journalistic question is somewhat different: why does the
Times trust the uncorroborated assertion that Mifsud told Papadopoulos
about the emails— and trust the claim to such a degree that the
newspaper would treat it as flat fact?Absent corroborating evidence,
isn’t it just as likely (if not more likely) that Papadopoulos is
telling the prosecutors what he thinks they want to hear?

Further, since Papadopoulos was peppering the Trump campaign with
news about his Russian outreach in 2016, you might have expected that he
would include something about how helpful the Russians had been in
obtaining and publicizing the Democratic emails.

But none of Papadopoulos’s many emails to Trump campaign officials
about his Russian contacts (as cited by the prosecutors)mentioned the
hot news about “dirt” on Clinton or the Russians possessing “thousands
of emails.”This lack of back-up would normally raise serious doubts
about Papadopoulos’s claim, but – since Papadopoulos was claiming
something that the prosecutors and the Times wanted to believe –
reasonable skepticism was swept aside.

What the Times seems to have done is to accept a bald assertion by
Mueller’s prosecutors as sufficient basisfor jumping to the conclusion
that this disputed claim is undeniably true. But just because
Papadopoulos, a confessed liar, and these self-interested prosecutors
claim something is true doesn’t make it true.

Careful journalists would wonder, as Shane did, why Papadopoulos who
in 2016 was boasting of his Russian contacts to make himself appear more
valuable to the Trump campaign wouldn’t have informed someone about
this juicy tidbit of information, that the Russians possessed “thousands
of emails” on Clinton.

That is why reporters are usually careful to use words like “alleged”in dealing with prosecutors’ claims that someone is guilty. However, in
Russia-gate, all the usual standards of proof and logic have been
jettisoned. If something serves the narrative, no matter how dubious, it
is embraced by the U.S. mainstream media, which – for the past year –
has taken a lead role in the anti-Trump “Resistance.”"...

Over the past few months, Obama campaign
and election officials, as well as nuclear non-proliferation experts,
had several "very, very high-level" contacts with Iranian leaders,
according to Jeffrey Boutwell, executive director for the U.S. branch of
the Pugwash group, a Nobel Prize-winning international organization of
scientists. Former defense secretary William Perry, who served in
Obama's election campaign, also participated in some of the meetings,
which included discussions on Iran's nuclear program and the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Though Boutwell refused to name other
participants, he said they were senior figures in the Iranian and US
governments.

In his first television interview
as president, conducted by the Muslim Al-Arabiya television network,
Obama called Iranians "a great people,"adding "the U.S. has a stake in
the well being of the Muslim world."

"The Iranian government should respect their people’s rights,
including their right to express themselves. The world is watching," it
said.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly taken aim at Iran,
denouncing its government as a "fanatical regime" and accusing it of
violating an international agreement aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear
program, refusing to certify its compliance with the deal.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert also addressed the protests.

Over the past few months, Obama campaign
and election officials, as well as nuclear non-proliferation experts,
had several "very, very high-level" contacts with Iranian leaders,
according to Jeffrey Boutwell, executive director for the U.S. branch of
the Pugwash group, a Nobel Prize-winning international organization of
scientists. Former defense secretary William Perry, who served in
Obama's election campaign, also participated in some of the meetings,
which included discussions on Iran's nuclear program and the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Though Boutwell refused to name other
participants, he said they were senior figures in the Iranian and US
governments.

In his first television interview
as president, conducted by the Muslim Al-Arabiya television network,
Obama called Iranians "a great people,"adding "the U.S. has a stake in
the well being of the Muslim world."

Court documents also depict him trying to destroy potential evidence,
saying he emailed his brother to “delete all of my emails from the
yahoo site,” expressing “concern about them subp[o]ening yahoo at some
point,” while concocting other fake documents to show the jury.

Jurors were barred from hearing a recording of a phone call in which
Omar Amanat dropped the name of Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s right-hand
woman, to a government witness, with defense lawyers saying the remark
was “irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial,” according to the Associated Press.

The indictment charges
that Amanat convinced people to invest millions of dollars in a tech
company called Kit Digital and lied to them to hide the fact that the
company was hemorrhaging cash. “The evidence of their criminal schemes
was so overwhelming that Amanat actually tried to fool the jury by
introducing fake emails into the record as exculpatory ‘evidence’ in
this trial,” acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said in a
statement. Prosecutors said he re-purposed millions of dollars of the
company’s money for his own personal use.

Amanat posted to his web site Tuesday a cryptic blog post called “Injustice In America,” saying, “The facts of this case will all be made plain to see shortly.
You’ve only seen snippets. You’re only seen what they want you to see.
Stay tuned…”

It was just the latest in a long series of allegations that Amanat has built his riches by lying and gaming the system.

In 2013, Amanat partnered with Vladislav Doronin to buy a luxury resort for $358 million.

An in-depth 2014 profile
in Fortune magazine says Doronin is “referred to in the British press
as the ‘Russian Donald Trump.'” Dorinin was born in what was then
Leningrad before moving to Geneva to work for Marc Rich,a financier who
fled the U.S. after being indicted for fraud and trading with Iran, and
was pardoned by former President Bill Clinton on Clinton’s last day in
office.

“Clinton’s motive for pardoning Rich on his last day in office was
questioned,” USA Today reports, “because Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich,
was a wealthy Democratic donor who made a $450,000 donation to Clinton’s
presidential library foundation and more than $100,000 to Hillary
Clinton’s Senate campaign.” The pardon was investigated by the FBI in
2001.

Amanat, for his part, claimed he made more than $200 million selling shares of Twitter. (An account purporting to be his hasn’t tweeted since 2013; its most recent two tweets are about Abedin and a “defense of Islam.”)

Amanat invested in the resort through Peak Ventures, “whose assets
include his money as well as that of family and friends,” the Fortune
profile reports.

In 2008,the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) had
permanently barred Amanat “from associating with any FINRA member firm
in any capacity” for repeatedly failing to disclose legal judgments and
an SEC investigation.

In 2002, he sold a company called Tradescape for $100 million to
E*Trade, which charged that Amanat hid that before it was sold, the
company had “no money! Zero. Zilch. Nada… We can’t pay any of our
bills,” as one employee wrote in a contemporaneous email, according to
the Forbes piece.

He declared bankruptcy and a creditor tried to seize his house, but
Amanat allegedly backdated a document –notarized by his mother–claiming
he had sold the house to his brother for $10 the prior year. The
creditor prevailed and the house was sold.

In another court case, the judge found that he had refused to comply with six court orders to produce documents.

Amanat will be sentenced April 25. Another cousin of Abedin’s, Irfan Amanat,
has been also charged with fraud and will be tried separately. He, too,
has a long record of flouting rules: In 2006, the Securities and
Exchange Commission said as chief technology officer of a brokerage, he
“engaged in a fraudulent scheme” by writing a computer program that tricked the Nasdaq exchange into giving him $50,000 in rebates.

Huma Abedin was vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign
and her deputy chief of staff at the Department of State. She was paid
at least $490,000 in one year
while she worked at the State Department after Clinton signed off on an
unusual staffing arrangement that allowed her to work as a consultant
to Teneo, a Clinton-connected company, as well as the Clinton Foundation
and Hillary herself, all while also working at State. The Washington
Post reports, “her overlapping roles make it diﬃcult to determine when she was working for the public and when her work was beneﬁting a private interest.”

The New York Times reports, “Abedin did not disclosethe arrangement — or how much income she earned — on her financial
report. It requires officials to make public any significant sources of
income.”

Abedin was interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation into Clinton’s unofficial email server and stated she “did not learn
Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of
State] tenure,” though other emails show her involved in discussions about the server, and the aide who set it up told the FBI he discussed it with Abedin."

The glow of their triumph wouldn’t last. The
partnership between Amanat and Doronin imploded with a velocity exceeded
only by the speed at which it was put together. Conflict erupted, with
allegations of fraud, conspiracy, extortion, intimidation, breach of
contract, and an attempted coup. Relations between the two deteriorated
so dramatically that at one point, Doronin told Amanat, according to a
claim in the latter’s legal filings, “If I feel you tried to screw me, I
will hunt you down and shoot you.” A Doronin spokesperson denies the
allegation.

Then came the lawsuits, massing some 30 attorneys in
New York and London and featuring an international cast of characters
that includes Adrian Zecha, Aman’s 81-year-old Singapore-based founder,
and Johan Eliasch, the 52-year-old London-based CEO of sporting goods
firm Head. A new hearing, following a series of temporary injunctions
that were issued in July, was scheduled for Sept. 15 in the London High
Court.

With Amanat and Doronin locked in a nasty feud as
each vies for control, Aman—the word means “peace” in Sanskrit—is
anything but tranquil. At stake is the future of the company. Beyond
that, mysteries abound, most particularly: Who, exactly, are the two men
brawling for this prize?

2. The Trader, The Supermodel, and The PoetOmar Amanat believed he was perfectly positioned to make a deal when he
heard Aman (the resemblance of the resort’s name to his surname is
coincidental) was up for sale in May 2013. A professed Aman junkie who
says he has invested in hotels, he notes, “It was a trophy asset, and I
was interested in buying it.”The son of Indian immigrants, Amanat grew up in
Queens, N.Y., and later New Jersey. His career originated in his
father’s basement. As stock trading—including the rapid in-and-out
version known as day trading—became a frenzied pastime for some
middle-class types in the 1990s, his dad set up a tiny operation
downstairs in the family house.

At age 23, Amanat joined Datek, a well-known
day-trading outfit, and he says he later helped build a stock-trading
platform that let regular investors track every buy and sell order for a
specific stock in real time, just as the professionals at the big
brokerage houses did. In 1997 he founded Tradescape, a direct-access
brokerage firm. By 2000 the company had acquired four subsidiaries,
including MarketXT, and was generating estimated annual revenues of $140
million. Amanat says he fielded numerous acquisition offers.
“Tradescape was the biggest day-trading company,” he boasts.

In 2002, Amanat sold Tradescape to E*Trade for $100
million in stock plus an additional $180 million if the company hit
certain targets. It seemed a moment of exultation and riches, but the
bubble quickly burst, and Amanat became entangled in lengthy litigation
(more on that later).

Despite the turmoil of his court fight, Amanat
presented a serene face to the world: a glamorous mix of wealth,
elegance, and more than a dollop of substance. He was a man about town,
charismatic and dashing—with a trademark scarf draped over his well-cut
blazer—the sort who could seduce a supermodel (in fact, he married one:
Helena Houdová, his second wife, from whom he is separated). Amanat was
also fond of quoting the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi.

It’s not clear what Rumi said about self-promotion, but Amanat has not
been shy about touting his accomplishments. Among the accolades recorded
on his personal website is being named one of Wall Street’s Top 10 Most
Influential Technologists and one of the Top 500 Most Influential
Muslims in the World. He sat on the boards of Human Rights Watch and
Malaria No More. And various Amanat-related websites credit him with
co-founding the UN-affiliated Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund and
Bridges TV, a television network aimed at countering negative
stereotypes of Islam."...

Patterns have not been detected. The FBI had known for at least three years [since 1998], for example, that at least two Bin Laden operatives trained to be pilots in the United States.One
of the pilots, Essam al Ridi, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Egyptian
descent, even purchased a used military aircraft in Arizona for Bin
Laden in 1993. He flew the Saber-40 twin-engine passenger jet to Sudan
after buying it for $210,000.

Federal authorities also knew
that Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 truck bombing of the World
Trade Center, later planned to blow up 12 United Airlines, Delta Air
Lines and Northwest Airlines jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean.

After
the plot was uncovered in 1995, a co-conspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad,
told police in the Philippines that he had hoped to hijack a passenger
plane and crash it into CIA headquarters outside Washington. Murad
had attended four U.S. flight schools. Yet no surveillance was in place
to scrutinize aspiring pilots or to raise a warning flag when the men
who would eventually hijack four jetliners Sept. 11trained at flight schools around the country.

Agents have been slow to recognize suspects.

After the 1993 attackon the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin was held and questioned by the FBI–and then allowed to leave the country.President
Bush last week named Yasin one of the country’s 22 “most wanted”
terrorists in connection with his alleged role in that attack. Another would-be bomber in that case used prison telephones 20 times to contact fellow plotters.

Bush said at his news conference Thursday that the FBI “must think differently” than it has in the past. “In a post-Cold War era, they were still chasing spies. Nothing wrong with that, except we have a new enemy.”

The CIA faces a similar challenge. The
U.S. satellites and other high-tech surveillance systems were designed
to snoop on Cold War governments and armies, not small bands of
religious fanatics.

Bin Laden “was a very small blip” after he launched Al Qaeda in 1989, said William H. Webster, a former head of the FBI and the CIA. Said another former official: “Bin Laden was declaring war on us, but we didn’t get it.”It wasn’t until 1996 that a special federal grand jury convened
in the southern district of New York to investigate what prosecutors
called “the structure, goals and operational status of Al Qaeda
worldwide; whether Al Qaeda was involved in planning crimes against American interests and, if so, which ones.”

Washington finally set up a secret interagency task force in 1998, led by the CIA, to track and capture Bin Ladenafter two U.S. embassies in Africa were hit by suicide bombers.

Competing missions are partly to blame.
Intelligence agencies seek to spy on suspected terrorists and prevent
future attacks; they need to cloak their sources to do it. The FBI and
federal prosecutors seek to expose and punish those who carry out terror
attacks; they need public witnesses and documents to do it.

U.S. law doesn’t always help. If a terrorist enters the United States, the National Security Agency, which intercepts communications overseas, must stop their efforts at the border, as they are barred from spying within the United States.

“You’re trying to track somebody; the agency [NSA] may have locked on the guy’s cell phone overseas.As soon as he shows up in the United States, they have to turn that off,” a former federal prosecutor in New York explained.

And in February, the U.S. Embassy
in London granted a student visa to an unemployed 33-year-old French
Moroccan man, Habib Zacarias Moussaoui, even though he was on a special French immigration watch list of suspected Islamic extremists.
Moussaoui was detained Aug. 17 on immigration charges after he
allegedly told a Minnesota flight school that he wanted to learn to
steer jumbo jets, but not learn to land them. Moussaoui remains in FBI
custody in New York as a material witness while investigators try to
determine whether he was involved with the skyjackers or any other
terrorist plot.

“There was something there that the FBI could have done more with, a warning signal that was missed,” a French official said.

U.S. officials say the missed signals
seem more important in hindsight. They did not miss any specific
warning about the events of Sept. 11, they say, because there wasn’t
one.

“The idea of commandeering an aircraft and crashing it into the ground and causing high casualties, sure we’ve thought of it,” saidPaul Pillar, the former deputy director of the CIA’s counter-terrorist center.
“But in terms of specific tip-offs to Sept. 11, no, we had nothing.”
Bill Harlow, a CIA spokesman, agreed: “There’s always lots of stuff that
seems more meaningful now than before an event. But is there something
that suggests they were going to fly an airplane or two into the World Trade Center? No. There was nothing specific about time, method or place.”[Nothing specific about “place”?The World Trade Center had been bombed by Islamists in 1993.] Still, Bin Laden hasn’t been shy about sharing his game plan.

In the summer of 1998,
he sent a fax from Afghanistan to Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a
London-based Muslim cleric who had dubbed himself the “mouth, eyes and
ears of Osama bin Laden.” Bakri later released what he called Bin Laden’s four specific objectives for a holy war against the U.S.

“Bring down their airliners,“ read the instruction. “Prevent the safe passage of their ships. Occupy their embassies. Force the closure of their companies and banks.”

It is fair to say he has achieved at least some of his goals.It also is fair to say U.S. authorities had the plotters in their grasp—or in their sights–in almost every case. Those missed opportunities thus form the backdrop to the country’s current war on terror.

“Force the Closure of Their Companies”

The U.S. government was pretty sure Ahmad Mohammad Ajaj was a terrorist from the moment he stepped foot on U.S. soil.

The 26-year-old Palestinian’s suitcases were stuffed with fake passports, fake IDs and a cheat sheet on how to lie to U.S. immigration inspectors.

And then there were the two handwritten notebooks filled with bomb recipes, the six bomb-making manuals, the four how-to videotapes concerning weaponry and the advanced guide to surveillance training.

But all federal prosecutors charged him with after Ajaj flew into New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport from Pakistan on Sept. 1, 1992, was passport fraud--a crude, photo paste job on a stolen Swedish passport at that.

The possession of terrorist literature, “believe it or not, was not a crime,” said
Eric Bernstein, the former prosecutor who handled the case. [This is
not an “either-or” situation despite the smug suggestion of Eric
Bernstein. There was much more to this individual than possession of
literature.] Ajaj was sentenced to six months in prison for passport violations.

Over the next five months Ajaj would speak frequently over a prison phone with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who had flown with him to New York. Yousef left the country Feb. 26, 1993, 12 hours after his bomb killed six, injured more than a thousand and caused $550 million worth of damage in the first World Trade Center attack.

Although prison phone calls are taped, no one monitored Ajaj’s 20 calls to Yousef and other conspirators–or tried to translate them from Arabic––until long after the blast. And no one traced his plane ticket until after the blast to determine that he and Yousef had sat together on the first leg of their journey to New York.

The result: No one figured out Ajaj’s plot or identified his co-conspirators until after the attack.
Indeed, Ajaj was released from prison three days after the explosion
and only later was rearrested and sentenced to more than 100 years in
prison for his role.

“I think what we’ve gotten really good at is going back and re-creating the trail after an incident,” said Henry DePippo, who eventually prosecuted Ajaj for conspiracy in the bombing. “We need to attack these cases with the same energy before a terrorist attack occurs.”

For starters, it would have helped to know just what Ajaj actually had in his Arabic-language “terrorist kit.” But his manuals had not been “disseminated to the intelligence community for full translationand exploitation of the information,” nine years after they were seized, L. Paul Bremer III, head of the National Commission on Terrorism, told a Senate committee in June.

“Occupy Their Embassies”

At first blush, the raid on a modest house in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi on Aug. 21, 1997, was a huge success.

Moving quietly, Kenyan police and veteran FBI agent Daniel Coleman found a trove of computer records and documents belonging
to Wadih El-Hage, the former “personal secretary” to Bin Laden, a top
Al Qaeda operative and a suspected “money conduit” for terrorist
attacks. He was due back that day from visiting Bin Laden in
Afghanistan.

Authorities found crucial data about Harun Fazhl, a Bin Laden operative who directed the operationsof a secret cell of terrorists plotting at that moment to bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Despite the intelligence coup, the two embassies were gutted by suicide truck bombs less than a year later;224 people died, including 12 Americans.

The CIA and the FBI missed key opportunities to prevent the blasts. They
knew from wiretaps on El-Hage’s four Nairobi phones, as well as from
the computer files they had seized, that Al Qaeda was forming a terror
cell in the Kenyan capital. Indeed, U.S. agents had in hand the names and identities
of some of the key Nairobi cell members who would rent the bomb
factory, build the bomb, buy the bomb truck, brief the suicide bombers
and even escort the bomb truck the day of the attack.

U.S. authorities nevertheless lagged several steps behind the embassy plotters. They still are behind:So
far, 10 suspects, including El-Hage, have been convicted or have
pleaded guilty or are in custody awaiting trial. But 13 others,
including Bin Laden and Fazhl, are still at large. And last week, Bush included Fazhl on his “most wanted” list of suspected terrorists.

U.S. investigators “never systematically tried to run down the information they had,”said Carl Herman, a lawyer for Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, one of four men convicted last summer in New York. “Maybe they didn’t have the manpower. Maybe they felt it wasn’t worth the effort.”

Sam Schmidt, El-Hage’s lawyer, said
his client insisted that U.S. investigators and prosecutors “shared some
responsibility for the tragedy.” El-Hage contended the government was well aware a year before the embassy attacks “of Harun Fazhl’s involvement in the ‘Al Qaeda cell’ in Nairobi,” Schmidt said during a pretrial hearing.

Others say the CIA and the FBI missed crucial signals–or failed to understand the ones they had. “I don’t think it’s a problem with intelligence gathering,” a lawyer familiar with the case said.

“It’s a problem with intelligence analysis.”

To be sure, tracking cell members wasn’t easy. They met regularly in mosques and on busy streets to throw off U.S. agents. They changed identities with false passports and visas. They moved sensitive documents from house to house to avoid detection.

On the other hand, they wandered in and out of the U.S. Embassy, scanning for weak points and undefended areas in the downtown building.

Bob Blitzer, who headed the FBI’s international terrorism section until 1997, said theCIA didn’t have enough field agents who spoke local languages and could blend in well enoughto conduct close-up surveillance without being detected.

“One of our biggest problems is we still haven’t found the key to penetrating those cells with human sources,” Blitzer said.

Instead, U.S. agents relied heavily on high-tech surveillance, especially wiretaps and intercepts of satellite phone calls by Bin Laden and his lieutenants in Afghanistan.

The wiretaps and intercepts produced tens of thousands of pages of transcripts over two years. Yet they did little good. U.S. officials often didn’t know who was speaking to whom.

“This wasn’t like Mafia wiretaps,
where you know who’s calling the boss; who’s who all the way down
through the organization,” a federal official familiar with the evidence
said. “These were just voices. And in most cases, they were talking in code.It only became clear to us after the bombings.”

The FBI discovered only then, for example, that Fazhl had replaced El-Hage as the mastermind and had directed the construction of the bomb.

“In a mob case, like a John Gotti case, you know where their hangouts are, where you can find them,” the official said. “Here, we had only a limited feel for where they operated. We didn’t have a line on all the players, and even the ones we did have, like Fazhl, it was unclear who they really were, where they were, and what they were up to day by day.”

On Feb. 28, 1998, Bin Laden issued his most violent fatwa, expanding his holy war from U.S. soldiers to include U.S. civilians.

That same day, Fazhl–who had been shuttling back and forth between Sudan and Kenya–bought a plane ticket for Nairobi.

The Kenyan capital would remain
his base until the deadly explosions six months later. A defense lawyer
argues that Fazhl should have been a key target for surveillance. “At that point, they should have picked him up full time,” the lawyer insisted.

Nor is there any evidence that
U.S. officials tried to work through the Kenyan government to break up
the cell, rather than simply try to watch it. Police, after all, had assisted the FBI in the raid on El-Hage’s home.

Instead, prosecutors hauled El-Hage
before a federal grand jury in New York in September 1997. They
pressured him to divulge what he knew about the plotting underway in
Africa. He denied any knowledge.

Some defense lawyers compared the
effort to pressure El-Hage to the tactics federal agents long have used
to get Mafia underlings and drug traffickers to inform.

Al Qaeda does share some similarities with organized crime networks–an “omerta-like” emphasis on silence, a pyramidic hierarchy
headed by a feared patriarchal figure, and an intermingling of
legitimate and criminal enterprises. But Bin Laden’s operatives have
proved far more difficult to crack.

“What makes it so much harder to turn these guys is their blind dedication. No one in the mob is that willing to die for the cause,” Blitzer said.

Not all the plotters died, of course. A week after the bombings, Fazhl flew to his Comoros Islands home. After a brief stay, he packed his clothes, travel documents and the passports belonging to the two suicide bombers.

Then, still as untouchable as he had been from the start, Fazhl followed his long-planned escape route by air to Pakistan and then into the rugged Afghan interior.

Among the victims of the attacks, anger against Al Queda is accompanied by bitter thoughts of the negligence that likely contributed to the tragedy.

A civil suit filed in Washington on behalf of the Kenyan victims is accompanied by documents showing that warnings that the building was “a soft target” went unheeded.

Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya at the time of the bombings, wrote
in a 1999 cable filed in the civil case: “Let me be blunt. Last year,
when this mission raised the vulnerability of the previous embassy
building, we received informal feedback that ‘some’ in Washington thought we were ‘overreacting.’ “

“Bring Down Their Airliners, Their Ships”

A CIA cable, ormessage, to FBI headquarters in Washington on Aug. 23 was not marked urgent. That was the first mistake.

Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, the cable advised, were in the United States, and Almihdhar might have evidence regarding last year’s attack on the warship Cole in Yemen.

The Cole, a guided missile destroyer, was refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden on Oct. 12, 2000, when two men motored alongside in a small skiff and detonated hundreds of pounds of C-4 military explosive. The blast killed 17 sailors and nearly sank one of the U.S.’ most modern warships.

The Pentagon had ordered no special security precautions for the Cole even though Yemen, Bin Laden’s ancestral home, was a hotbed of militant Islam.
U.S. intelligence had failed even to detect an attempted attack on
another U.S. warship, the Sullivans, in Aden harbor 10 months earlier.

In that case, the attack boat was so
overloaded with explosives that it sank in the harbor. The Cole
attackers learned from that mistake.

After the Cole was hit, the FBI rushed dozens of agents to Yemen. But a yearlong investigation into the attackproduced no indictments or prosecutions.

So the CIA cable should have triggered some action. A routine check of public records would have shown the men’s last known addresses.A search of credit card transactions would have shown the purchase of airline tickets for Sept. 11. Neither apparently was done.

Instead, Almihdhar and Alhazmi were located only after they and three other conspirators had boarded American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, seized control of the cockpit in flight and crashed the aircraft into the side of the Pentagon, killing 189 people.

It’s impossible to know whether
their capture before Sept. 11 would have provided enough information to
unravel the conspiracy and thwart the deadly attacks. What is clear is that the foremost terrorist-hunting agencies in the U.S. missed a crucial opportunity.

The case dates from January 2000, when a group of men with suspected terrorist ties met in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.
The CIA obtained a surveillance videotape about a month later that
shows men arriving at the meeting, according to a U.S. intelligence
official. The tape, he said, has no sound and wasn’t viewed as very significant at the time.

“We knew who some of the people
were, and worked on identifying them,” the official said. “At the time,
it was interesting video of a bunch of guys with shaky backgrounds
getting together for unknown reasons.”

Then, last summer, Yemeni
authorities interrogated a suspect in the Cole case. He allegedly told
them that an Al Qaeda operative had masterminded the attack. The same man already was being sought for questioning in the 1998 embassy bombing case.

“We go back and dust off everything
we have on this guy,” the intelligence official said. “We discover he’s
at this meeting in Kuala Lumpur a year or more before. We see who else
is there. We determine that among the group is Khalid Almihdhar. That
raises our interest in him.”

The agency then did what it calls
“link analysis.” “We see who’s there, who’s meeting whom, where do they
live, who did they travel with, who lived together, that sort of thing,”
a second intelligence official said.

One flight record showed Almihdhar traveling together with Alhazmi. The CIA also determined that Almihdhar had attended one of Bin Laden’s terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

On Aug. 21, [2001] the CIA
recommended to the Immigration and Naturalization Service that both men
be added to a special “watch list” keptto bar people with suspected terrorist ties from entering the United States. But the INS determined that both men already were here.

On Aug. 23, the CIA sent the cable to the FBI.

Almihdhar had listed “Marriott hotel” as his planned address when he flew into New York,so the FBI started there. The New York field office got the case Aug. 27.

“Something like that is so common, it really doesn’t have any bells attached to it,” said a former FBI agent who worked counter-terrorism cases. “Just to say there are two possible Arab terrorists in the United States is ho-hum. You could have 10 more people you are working that day with hotter leads.”

Another week passed. Shortly after Labor Day, the FBI in New York advised Washington that they could not find the two men. Agents went back to the INS. Almihdhar had listed a Sheraton hotel on his previous trip to Los Angeles. So the case was passed to the Los Angeles field office Sept. 9 or Sept. 10.

“It was like trying to find two rats in a crowded stadium. We didn’t have a chance,” one FBI agent recalled.
Added another, “If we get word five weeks after someone gets into the
country that they’re here and we should find them, that’s kind of a cold
trail.”

But a routine check of addresses and records from the California Department of Motor Vehicleswould have shown that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had been living at a series of addresses in and around San Diego.

And a check with credit card companieswould have shown that Alhazmi used a Visa card in his name on the Internet to purchase a ticket on Flight 77 for Sept. 11.He bought the ticket Aug. 27 and gave an address in Fort Lee, N.J., according to law enforcement records.

Senior intelligence and law enforcement officials insist they acted appropriately given the scant information they had.

“Suppose [U.S. immigration] had the name
before and Almihdhar had shown up at the airport to come to the United
States,” one official said. “They would have excluded him. They wouldn’t have anything to charge him with.
And it’s unlikely he would have blabbed about the World Trade Center.
That would not have been the spark to roll up the organization.”

A law enforcement official similarly defended the FBI. He said the bureau was asked only to locate the two men and had no grounds to detain or arrest them.

“Even if we had established surveillance on them from day one in this country . . . and we had been notified in a timely manner, there was nothing to arrest these guys on when they entered the country,” the official said.

Leaving aside the xenophobia, Ford's argument made economic sense: If
NAFTA were to create more jobs in Mexico, fewer Mexican workers would
leave. When people can earn a decent living in their own country, they
would generally rather stay put.... NAFTA proponents...claimed that merely opening Mexico
to free trade and unregulated foreign investment would produce the job
growth and rising incomesneeded to create a stay-at-home middle class.
It was the capstone on an effort begun in the early 1980s by a group of
U.S.-educated economists and businesspeople who took over the ruling
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in order to build a
privatized, deregulated and globalized Mexican economy. Among their
chief objectives was tearing up the old corporatist social contract in
which the benefits of growth were shared with workers, farmers and
small-business people through an elaborate set of institutions connected
to the PRI.

The next day, in Mexico City, a large group of very ardent Mexican
farmersbroke down the door of the lower house of the Mexican Congressto denounce NAFTA and demand that it be renegotiated. Similar
demonstrations -- joined by teachers, utility workers and others -- have
erupted throughout the country, closing bridges and highways and taking
over government offices. Polls show that most Mexicans think NAFTA was
bad for Mexico. Largely because of the agreement, Salinas is the most
unpopular ex-president in modern Mexican history.

NAFTA is not the cause of all Mexico's economic troubles,
but it has clearly made them worse. Since NAFTA's inception in 1994 --
indeed, for the 20 years of neoliberal "reform" --the Mexican middle
class has shrunk and the number of poor has expanded. Economic growth
has been below the old corporatist economy's performance and
substantially less than what is needed to generate jobs for Mexico's
growing labor force. During his 2000 campaign, Mexican President Vicente
Fox promised that under his six-year term the country would grow 7
percent per year. Two and a half years after his inauguration, growth
has averaged less than 1 percent.

Salinas and the PRI reformers did not, of course, announce that they intended to depopulate rural Mexico.. The Mexican government promised
that as tariffs on U.S. agriculture products fell, generous financial
and technical assistance would enable small farms to increase their
productivity in order to meet the new competition.But, after the treaty
was signed, the reformers pulled the rug out from under the rural
peasantry. Funding for farm programs dropped from $2 billion in 1994 to
$500 million by 2000.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress massively increased subsidies for corn,
wheat, livestock, dairy products and other farm products exported to
Mexico. American farmers now receive 7.5 to 12 times more in government
help than Mexican farmers do. This "comparative advantage" enabled U.S.
agribusiness to blow thousands of Mexican farmers out of their own
markets.But when the displaced campesinos arrived in nearby cities, few
jobs were waiting. NAFTA concentrated growth along Mexico's northern
border, where factories -- called maquiladoras -- processed and
assembled goods for the then-booming U.S. consumer market. Between 1994
and 2000, maquiladora employment doubled while employment in the rest of
the country stagnated.

Made whole with more than $60 billion of
the taxpayers' money, these crony capitalists resold their banks at a
handsome markup to foreign investors. For example, an investment group
headed by the well-connected Roberto Hernandez bought Mexico's
second-largest commercial bank for $3.2 billion and sold it to CitiGroup
for $12.5 billion. Yet, as 85 percent of the country's banking system
was being turned over to foreigners, lending to Mexican business
actually dropped from 10 percent of the country's gross domestic
product in 1994 to 0.3 percent in 2000. The global bankers were more
interested in taking deposits and making high-interest-rate consumer
loansthan in developing Mexico's internal economy.

An Amnesty International report on the border town of Ciudad Juárez,
where hundreds of young women have been killed, quotes the director of
the city's only rape crisis center (annual budget: $4,500): "This city
has become a place to murder and dump women. [Authorities] are not
interested in solving these cases becausethese women are young and poor
and dispensable."

It is an odd notion of economic development that rests on the meager
savings of low-wage Mexican workers in America while wealthy Mexicans
regularly ship their capital to New York, London and Zurich....

As in many developing countries, the largest part of Mexico's economic
problem lies not in restricted export markets but in the stifling
maldistribution of wealth and power that restricts internal growth. The
gap between Mexico's rich and poor is among the worst in the Western
Hemisphere. The rich hardly pay any taxes....Mexico -- even more than did the poorest
nations of Western Europe -- needs substantial investment in education,
health and infrastructure to create sufficient jobs for its people. A
contribution to that investment by the United States and Canada
equivalent to the EU's cohesion funds would approach $100 billion....Anything near that level would require,
among other things, a dramatic democratic reform ofMexico's corrupt and
inefficient public sector....